FREE chapter of Canal House Cooking, Vol. 4 below!

The bursting flavors of summer fruits and vegetables can be made to last all year by canning and preserving them. Canning can brighten your pantry throughout the year, extending the life of perishable produce and utilizing those fruit and vege ‘gluts’ that can sometimes occur when growing food at home.

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Fruit-based preserves are always good when added to desserts. This steamed sweet marmalade pudding used some of the sweet homemade mandarine marmalade that we recently posted on, as well as some of the quince jelly we made a while back. It was quite easy to make, with nearly all of the ingredients sourced from the pantry. It turned out as something in-between a pudding and a cake. Delicious served with a spoonful of ice-cream, whipping cream or sour cream.

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Canaan’s Mum brought us over a bag of tiny sweet mandarines a few weeks back. The skins were so thin that we knew they would be perfect for a batch of marmalade. We used them in combination with a few oranges and mandarines picked from our own trees. The result is a deliciously sweet and sticky marmalade, with yummy candied chunks of mandarine and orange – perfect on toast, on icecream and in desserts. Unlike most marmalades, this did not turn out very bitter or acidic, likely due to the thin skins and low pith content of the mandarines. Enjoy!

Several months ago I made a very large batch of Apricot jam. Unfortunately, I burned the entire batch. Not overly so, but enough to notice a slight smoky flavour when you spread it on your toast. This smoky taste is not so appealing in the on-your-toast context, but works really well in BBQ sauces, which have a natural affinity with smoky flavours. (Good thing, too, as I have about 10-15kg of this ‘smoked’ batch of apricot jam! It should keep me making BBQ sauces for a long time into the future!!). Below are the recipes not only for how you can make a BBQ sauce using apricot jam, but also for something you can do with it: barbeque ribs. We’re a bit hard up again at the moment and only had mutton breasts on hand, which are (older) sheep’s ribs. These were still delicious, but you could use pork or beef ribs, or even chicken wings, for a fantasticly sticky BBQ treat. Great with a homebrew! We chose a homebrewed Coopers Mexican Cerveza with a slice of almost-ripe orange stuffed in the neck (as pictured). Enjoy!

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We finally got around to processing those quinces the other day – the ones we wrote about ages ago – with most of them going in to making a large batch of quince jelly (we didn’t make quince leather this time with the byproducts – the chooks looked hungry for a fruity feed!). We also made a jar of poached quinces (made from quinces that were peeled, cored, cut into wedges, and very gently poached in a sugar syrup with lime juice, cloves and cinnamon sticks), but for now here is our recipe for quince jelly.